


One Word, Five Letters, Sounds like 'Rust'

by livenudebigfoot



Series: stop trying to make me give this series a title like it's serious or something oh my god [2]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: M/M, Reluctant Dom, Topping from the Bottom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 09:54:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most people don’t trust Fusco so easy, not without sacrifice or a referral. Leon never asked for either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Word, Five Letters, Sounds like 'Rust'

Leon’s halfway through looping the chain on the handcuffs through a bar in the headboard of the bed when he glances back over his shoulder and says, “How you holding up, big guy?”

“Okay,” Fusco says, because he does feel okay. The weed has softened everything up and made it all into one big fluffy morass of okayness. Off the top of his head, he can think of no less than five things that he should be really worried about right now and he can’t bring himself to give a damn about any of them. This, in turn, makes him worry. He flops facedown across the foot of the bed with a groan.

Leon pauses, turns himself halfway over so he’s lying on his side, and peers at Fusco through the arc of his arm. “You gonna pass out?”

“No,” he mumbles into the comforter.

“’Cause if you’re gonna pass out, I’m not gonna do the cuffs.”

“I’m not going to pass out.” He lifts his head, rubs hard at the side of his face, scrapes his hand on a day’s worth of stubble. “I was just thinking.”

“Well. Fuckin’. Stop that. I’m about to handcuff myself to a bed for you. Pay attention.”

“Alright, alright. Keep your shirt on.” Fusco clumsily inches his way up the hotel bed.

The phrase “Keep your shirt on” is completely metaphorical and kind of belated, because Leon already took off his shirt a while ago, along with most of his clothes. He’s down to boxer briefs and half a sock at this point, which Fusco thinks is kind of impressive in a weird sort of way. They haven’t known each other all that long. Fusco’s not sure if he even likes Leon and he kinda suspects that Leon only suggested this as a way to kill time. There’s not a lot of camaraderie there. Not a lot of trust or closeness. Fusco wouldn’t have had the courage or the lack of shame necessary to strip down.

And he really hasn’t. Leon cozied up to him when they first tumbled into the room, straddled his legs and peeled Fusco out of his jacket, stole his tie (“Is this a clip-on? _You dork_.”), and unbuttoned Fusco’s shirt just far enough to make the space to give him a hickey on his thick, bullish neck. That’s all.

As he kicks his shoes off the edge of the bed, Fusco thinks that maybe he likes that unwarranted, unreciprocated trust Leon’s putting in him. Even though it’s probably the reason Leon almost gets killed so often. Most people don’t trust Fusco so easy, not without sacrifice or a referral. Leon never asked for either.

_Well_ , Fusco thinks as the cuffs finally ratchet into place and he drapes one arm over Leon’s thigh, buries his face in Leon’s hip, just above the elastic of his underwear, _I **did** almost save his life that one time_.

“Awwww,” Leon breathes as Fusco opens his mouth and starts to trace out the shape of his hipbone with tongue and teeth. “You’re really _nice_ , you know that?”

He’s distracted by the taste of strange skin under his tongue and by the way his nose and brow keep pushing into that rise at the bottom of Leon’s stomach that’s half wiry, skinny-kid muscle and half soft fat. “Mmm?” he responds dully.

“You just seem kinda…” Leon’s moving again, clumsily. It’s an attempt to roll over onto his back as much as it is a sloppy, eager push against Fusco’s mouth. “…Kinda like you don’t get your way that much. Is that cool to say?”

“Uh huh.” He lends a helping hand, makes a cradle for Leon’s lower back and helps him turn. The chain of the cuffs is all twisted up and his wrists are crossed, but he doesn’t look uncomfortable. Ruffled, a bit. His hair spikes off at odd angles and his head lifts in an awkward kind of way so he can look Fusco in the eye. The ball gag is still where he left it, glistening wetly against his collarbone because Leon talks too much to commit to it. Fusco nods. “Yeah, that’s safe to say.”

“So I kinda figured you’d come innnnngh.” He trails off with a groan as Fusco’s head drops again and he starts to lap at sensitive skin. “C-come in swinging or whatever. Like, smack me around, call me names, try to make me do stuff. Really act like a dick. I just wasn’t expecting foreplay, you know? It’s nice.”

Fusco looks up at him, rests his chin on Leon’s stomach, feels it rise and fall around him with slightly frantic gasps of breath. He can feel Leon getting hard against his throat. “Did you want me to do that? Act like a dick?”

He shrugs as best he can. “Eh. Kinda. This is good too, though.”

There’s something about the way Leon looks at him then, all flushed and wet-eyed, that makes him think again, _I did **almost** save his life that one time_. Almost. He did give it a shot, put the effort in, but all he won for his trouble was a few hours tied to a chair, a lifetime of humiliation, and a shiny, jagged healing spot high on his brow. It was Reese who did the actual saving. Fusco wonders why Reese isn’t the one who Leon went after. He’d be good at this kind of thing. He’s, what’s the word, authoritative. Reese knows what he’s doing.

“You sure?” He slides his hands in under Leon’s thighs where they meet the mattress and digs his fingers in. “I mean, I don’t really, uh. It’s like you say,” he says as he guides Leon’s legs apart. He wonders if Leon already went after Reese and got shot down, and now Fusco’s the bargain bin replacement. “I don’t get my way that much. I’m not so used to it. But I could give it a shot,” he murmurs, brushing one cheek against the inside of Leon’s thigh, “if that’s what you need.”

“Hah.” Leon’s stomach jumps nervously with the sudden, harsh expulsion of breath. “Really?”

“Yeah. You know, whatever…” He licks a wide streak up the front of Leon’s underwear. “Whatever floats your boat.” He lowers his head again, nuzzles at Leon’s cock through the fabric.

Leon jolts and keens in the back of his throat every time he moves his tongue now. “Ahhh.” Lick. “I don’t.” Lick. “Nnnh.” Lick. “You know, dude,” he says very quickly, trying to squeeze it in between brushes of Fusco’s tongue, “you just do your thing. My boat’s floating just fffffff. Fine! Fine, just fine. Oh my _god_.”

He smiles against the seam of Leon’s underwear, presses the tip of his tongue down hard to trace the outline of him. The briefs have that odd, clean taste, wet cotton and detergent. Increasingly, there is the tang of salt, sweat and precome.

He wonders how he’s doing, as shoddy replacements go.

Leon whines.

Okay, he guesses.

Fusco lets himself relax. He doesn’t have to impress anybody right now; Leon’s about as impressed as he’s going to get. So he settles in there between Leon’s thighs and gets just the littlest bit lazy. He mouths his way, vague and soft-lipped, up and down the length of Leon’s dick where it stands out hard beneath navy blue cotton. Doesn’t really try to do anything. Not tease, not finish him off, not hit any one spot in particular. His goal, uncomplicated as it is, is to make sure there isn’t a single dry spot on the front of that underwear. Seems doable. Seems easy. They’re well on their way.

Leon’s throat is working. He tamps down the funny, high pitched noises he keeps making, flattens out the quaver in his voice as best he can. “You gonna take your clothes off?”

“I don’t need to,” he murmurs, speaking with his lips pressed right to Leon, “not for this.”

“No.” His hips arc against Fusco’s mouth. “No, it’s just – nnn – you’re kinda like the shy kid at the pool right now.”

He chuckles, dark and suppressed by the fabric of Leon’s underwear, and the vibration of his voice makes Leon twitch. “Is that really what you wanna ask about?”

It takes a while for Leon to find his voice again between whimpering and broken murmurs and rattling the chain but finally he says, “You gonna take _my_ clothes off?”

“Hnn.” He almost doesn’t need to at this stage. The underwear is sodden; Fusco thinks he can feel individual veins through the fabric but he knows that thin degree of separation has got to be killing this whole thing for Leon right now. Fusco knows. Fusco can relate. “We’ll see.”

Leon squirms, aims a playful, weightless kick at Fusco’s shoulder. His heel skims over the shoulder, over the heavy bones of his back and falls to rest there along his spine, with his knee hooked over Fusco’s shoulder by his ear. The drape of his leg is like an awkward, one-armed hug pulling Fusco closer against him. He curls in, but because he can’t see a way toward giving Leon exactly what he wants and because the salt and detergent taste is starting to be too much, Fusco lets his mouth wander away to the soft inside of Leon’s thigh and that’s where he starts to suck.

He’s hard too, now. Probably has been for a while. He was just distracted. He’s finding it more and more difficult to think about himself these days. Worrying about his own problems has only ever gotten him into trouble, so maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Now that he can’t, now that Reese won’t let him, it’s sort of become automatic.

His hands are occupied, buried in the twitchy, wiry muscle of Leon’s thighs, so it’s not like he can jerk off right now. He wonders if rubbing himself against the bed is too adolescent, too pathetic, or if it’s just leveling the playing field. He makes an experimental thrust into the rough hotel bedcover. The friction is faint, yielding and not-enough, but it’s better than nothing. It takes the edge off.

It takes a while, a long while of sucking and biting and teasing and pushing weakly against the bed until he spares a glance up the bed and finds Leon staring at him, neck craned, arms straining, eyes nearly black with arousal. “You, uh.” His tongue darts out, flicks momentarily across his dry lips. “Are you hard?”

“Yeah,” he rasps. He’s kinda stuck on the dark, glossy flatness of Leon’s eyes right now, how they’re overwhelmed and desperate and how that’s because of him somehow.

“Do you want me to, uh, do something?”

“Yeah,” he says, because suddenly there’s nothing he wants more. He’s actually nodding, openly. “Cuffs off?”

“No, no, man, I’m good. Just come up here. Come up to my level.”

So he does. So he crawls up over Leon’s body, avoiding arms and legs, and settles over top of him. Not _on_ him, not really. Fusco’s elbows and knees take most of the strain and he doesn’t want to lean too hard on him. Leon’s skinny. More bendy than brittle or fragile but you never know how bending somebody might hurt them. It’s alright, though, it’s just fine because Leon surges up to fill the gap between them and he’s not sure where that little guy gets the leverage with his hands still chained to the headboard but he gets it and he uses it to press a kiss to the corner of Fusco’s mouth.

“Okay.” When they separate, he is grinning with perverse glee. “Just drop your hips down a little, okay? So they’re like riiiight between my legs. No, man, I mean right up against them. Relax, you’re not gonna squish me. I’m not an ant or whatever. Come on, just, like you’re gonna fuck me. There we go.” Leon wriggles himself into position, clasps his legs around Fusco’s waist. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, do your thing.”

He’s slow to start. He’s not sure he can be blamed for that. It’s an unusual situation and he needs a moment to find his footing. The position is familiar but the lack of penetration, the lack of clear goal kinda troubles him. Leon helps. Leon tightens his legs and grinds against him, rough and encouraging, and that’s it, that’s apparently all it takes to make him mock-fuck Leon into a hotel mattress with a kind of enthusiasm Fusco forgot he was capable of. It’s separation, it’s safety, it’s distance, but he thinks he can feel the wetness of his own spit on Leon’s underwear through the front of his pants and that makes it all goddamn real. That and the noises Leon keeps making, the gasps and the overexcited yells, and the muffled reverberations of his own whines as they bounce back to him in the curve of Leon’s neck, make it all too much goddamn fun.

He doesn’t realize at first that Leon’s talking, actually saying words and he pipes down, listens.

“Fuck me,” he’s saying.

Fusco growls, “Yes,” against his jugular.

“Okay?”

“ _Yes._ ” Fusco grabs at Leon’s hips.

“Face down?”

Fusco forgets to even respond to that, he just flips Leon over, untwisting the handcuffs. His hands are still digging into Leon’s hips and Leon’s ass is pushed back against him all eager and the blood is pounding savage in his ears. He grabs at the back of Leon’s underwear, hears the elastic snap as he drags it down.

“Wait!”

He freezes, one hand still grabbing at Leon’s ass. “You, uh.” He lets go, gives Leon a soft pat by way of farewell. “You wanna stop? Sorry, I didn’t realize I was getting rough…”

“Nonononono. No. No, you’re good. You’re doing great. I just. Wow, I should have kept quiet. I killed the mood.”

“Hey,” he says, rubbing a little circle at the small of Leon’s back. “It’s fine. If there’s a problem, I want to know.”

“Well, that’s kind of the thing. It’s not really a problem so much as a…” Leon peeks back over his shoulder. His face is red with exertion and embarrassment. “It just seems like a waste, you know? Like, we’ve got the cuffs and the ball gag but we’re not really…doing that much with them. Or, we kinda are. With the teasing and all; that was good. That was fun. I wouldn’t have thought to ask for that. And I know it’s shitty timing, but you _said_ we could if I needed to, and…”

Fusco gets it, he thinks. “You want me to act like a dick?”

Leon considers it for a moment. “ _No_ ,” he says decisively. “No, you really…you just kinda aren’t. You’re just not a mean guy.”

“You haven’t known me very long.”

“Yeah, but you aren’t, though. You keep checking in with me. Letting me boss you around and shit. And I’m not complaining about that; I think that’s pretty fucking great. You just be you, you know? Don’t try to be some other asshole. I was just kinda hoping you’d, you know, spank me a little. If that’s cool.”

It takes a second for Fusco to jump start his brain. “I. Yeah. No problem.”

“Okay? That’s not weird?”

“No. Well. No weirder than anything else you’ve done tonight. So, how do you want to…do you just want me to count it out or something?”

“I’ll count,” Leon says firmly.

“No gag?”

“Nah. Maybe some other time when I’m not talking you through it. So, you want to just do like ten? Maybe throw in an extra if I miscount or something? You cool with that?”

Fusco’s stuck. _Maybe some other time_. “Yeah. Sure. Sounds fine.”

“Okay.” Leon turns to stare down the headboard, takes a deep breath, squirms as he exhales. “Ready when you are.”

Fusco takes a deep breath of his own.  “Okay.” He’s got big hands, square palms, strong, stubby fingers. He could hurt Leon, if he tried. He won’t try.

But he won’t go easy on him either.

The first smack is actually audible, a solid _thwack_ that’s suddenly too loud for their quiet hotel room. Leon yelps with pain and surprise. He swallows, adjusts his stance. “One,” he says.

“You okay?”

“ _One_ ,” he repeats.

Fusco sighs. His palm is tingling. He shakes it out, slaps again without warning.

“ _Ow!_ Two.”

“You don’t sound like you’re having fun.”

Leon groans with annoyance, looks back over his shoulder. “I’ll let you know, okay?”

Fusco nods.

“It’s, like, it’s complicated, dude. If I want you to stop, I’ll tell you.” His face softens, becomes sympathetic. “You’re doing a good job.”

He can’t let himself be sure of that. He slides his palm down in between Leon’s legs, feels Leon shudder responsively. Still hard. Still trapped.  Fusco didn’t pull the underwear down far enough and now it’s tight around the tops of his thighs, pressing his dick tight to his body.

“Umm. About that,” Leon murmurs as Fusco slides two fingers between elastic and skin. “Could you do me a favor and pull that down just a smidge?”

Fusco presses a kiss to the small of Leon’s back, neat, dry, and decisive. “No.”

He can feel the vibrations of Leon’s laugh as they radiate down Leon’s spine. “You’re the best,” Leon says.

The next three smacks come in quick succession and leave Leon bowled over into the pillow with his head in his bound arms. “Three,” he whimpers. “Four.”

“That all?”

“Five!”

“Atta boy. You got it.” He rubs at that same spot on Leon’s back where he kissed him. “Halfway there.”

“Let’s do it.” He sounds determined, but his voice is muffled by his arms.

Next, he tries to leave a mark. Nothing permanent, nothing that wouldn’t be gone in a few minutes. Just a red, deliberate handprint. He strikes hard at the left cheek, gets weird kind of thrill at Leon’s full body shiver and quavering “Six.” He holds for a while, lifts, and finds a perfect imprint of his palm and fingers there on the pale skin. He runs his knuckles over it fondly.

“There we go.” He slaps again and leaves a matching handprint on the right.

“Eight,” Leon mumbles a few seconds later as Fusco gives him a break by paying a little attention to Leon’s trapped prick.

“Seven,” Fusco corrects.

“Sorry.” Leon thrusts happily into Fusco’s hands. “Guess you’ll have to give me an extra. To make up for it.”

 He laughs, buries his face in Leon’s shoulder. “You little fucker. You did that on purpose.” Fusco gives his dick a rough squeeze. “You’re not sitting down right for a week.”

The cock in his hand jerks and it surprises him, the sudden enthusiasm, the arousal at the words, his words. Or, sort of. The words of many pornographic actors before him. Whatever, Fusco’s the one who said them and the person he said them to took them seriously. That’s what matters.

“Hey, dude?” Leon asks, interrupting Fusco as he winds up for another strike.

“What?”

“Can you really…?” Leon stops, takes a breath. “I mean, really go for it these last few. You’re doing fine, this isn’t, like, criticism or anything, just. Hard as you can.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, totally. I want to see if I can take it.”

Fusco squints at him. “So you don’t _know_.”

“Well, you’ve never hit me as hard as you could before. So, yeah, I don’t know. I wanna find out what I’m working with here. Come on. Hard as you can. Pretend my ass is someone you hate.”

“ _Wow_.”

“Okay,” he shrugs. “Or don’t do that. Just, come on. Do it. Please?”

He lets the please hang in the air between them. It’s strange and heavy, because Fusco still doesn’t think he deserves it. He doesn’t understand why Leon’s heaping all this trust on him. Where does he get it all and why does he think Fusco’s a good person to keep it with? He doesn’t know. He does not know. Leon’s already in position again, ass in the air, forehead braced on his arms. Not looking, not asking. Just waiting.

He did say please.

The slap is loud, but Leon is completely silent. Just a gasp and a shudder and odd, soundless biting at the air. After a while, the only sound is his exhalation, a long, pained squeak.

“You alright?”

“ _Ouch_ ,” Leon whispers emphatically.

“Want to take a break?”

“Holy fuck, _ouch_.”

“Okay, we’re done. Where’d you put the keys to those things?”

Leon’s shaking his head furiously. “We’re good, we’re good,” he says. His voice is strained. “I mean, Jesus Christ, never hit me that hard _again_ , but I’m good to go on.”

“Sorry.” He rubs at Leon’s ass, feels the heat under the skin. “I should have gone easier on you.”

“Nah. I asked you to do it, remember? And now we know.”

He repeats back, a little bit mindless, a little bit indulgent, “Now we know.”

 “And knowing is half the battle,” Leon mumbles dreamily. “Wow, you have hands like boat oars, you know that? Big hands. Woodsman’s hands. Fuckin’ calluses. That doesn’t mean stop,” he says as Fusco’s hands pause guiltily mid-massage. “There’s lube and condoms on the nightstand if you want to get going on that.”

Fusco wouldn’t admit to it, not right now, but he is really, really eager to get going on that. He grabs for the plastic bottle of lube, empties way more of it than he planned to onto his palm and fingers. It’s thin, prone to pooling and slipping out of his hands so he smears as much of it as he can onto Leon. For a while he just rubs there at the entrance and lets Leon recover.

“So, why’d you ask me to do that?” he asks.

“Mmph. Like I said. I wanted to see if I could take it.”

“Why would you want to know?”

“Dunno.” Leon shrugs as best he can. “It’s kinda fun. Like a test you don’t really have to study for. You just see how you did compared to the last one.” He pushes back against Fusco’s hand. “You were really going easy on me, weren’t you?”

“No,” Fusco says, sliding one finger in and marveling at how easily Leon accepts it, with only a sigh and a shifting of hips. “No, that really is about as hard as I’ve ever slapped a person.”

“Oh, god, not then.” Leon is inching his knees apart, trying to make room. “If it was then, I’d probably cry. No, before then. When we were just messing around. Don’t be stingy; I can take two.”

Fusco’s tempted to be skeptical about Leon’s tolerance, given what just happened, but he took one finger pretty easily, so he slides in the middle alongside it and stretches. Again, Leon just accepts and breathes. “I wouldn’t have called it that,” he says. “I didn’t feel like I was going easy on you. I just wasn’t trying to really hurt you.”

“Oh,” says Leon, sounding like maybe he doesn’t think there’s a distinction. “Well, thanks for that, anyway.”

Fusco slides in his thumb at the next stroke of his fingers, opens him up wide and Leon’s breath hitches. He exhales long and shivery, leans forward, and lets Fusco push deep into him. There’s the acceptance again, smooth and deliberate and graceful, so it’s a surprise when Leon clenches around him with a thin, shaky little moan, whispers, “Sorry,” in a very small voice, and then starts to convulse, hard at first and with loud gasps and jerks, but gradually fading to small, uncontrollable pulses.

Fusco reaches between Leon’s legs, pulls his underwear down to his knees and works his wet, rapidly softening cock through the last of it.

“Really?” Fusco says to him. “Just from that?”

“You got me all worked up,” Leon says defensively.

“There’s worked up and then there’s a hair trigger.”

“Shut up.” Then, brightly, “You wanna fuck me anyway? I’m fine with it.”

“If that’s what you want.”

Leon shoots him a glance over one shoulder. “Nah,” he says. His brow is furrowed like he just realized something. “Uncuff me. I’m getting bored of looking at the same old bedspread, you get me?”

There’s a quiet, confused scramble for the keys, a slow, creaky unfolding, and a brief resting period where Leon shucks his underwear the rest of the way off of his legs and gripes happily about the raw marks on his wrists. “ _That’s_ the stuff,” Leon says in admiring tones as he traces one of the red, stinging circles with his finger. Offhand, he adds, “Take your clothes off.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? Come on, shy kid. Strip down already.”

Fusco fiddles with the top button on his shirt. “I’m not much to look at,” he warns.

“Shut up. Be naked.”

“Fine, fine,” but he’s nervous. He is, because he realizes slowly that he can’t do for Leon what Leon just did for him. He can’t bolt himself to a headboard and expect things to turn out alright.

Leon’s on him after a few seconds, starts unbuttoning Fusco’s shirt from the bottom up so their hands meet in the middle. While Fusco’s wrestling his way out of his shirtsleeves, Leon goes for his pants, pops the button and yanks them down to his ankles, guides them over his feet, and throws them against the wall, apparently just for the pleasure of watching them hit. Seconds later, Fusco’s undershirt is being grabbed by the bottom hem and shoved high up on his chest and all Fusco can do is sit there stunned, leaning back on his hands where they’re pressed against the bed. Leon sits in front of him, cross-legged, plucking at the waistband of Fusco’s boxers. He’s grinning, sharp-edged and overexcited.

“Oh, man,” Leon says. “You are killing me over here.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Are you blushing right now? You’re ridiculous. Come here.” Leon scoots closer to him, gets up on his knees and shoves happily at Fusco’s shoulders. “Hey, are you…” he asks as Fusco is knocked backward into bed, “…freaking out?”

“Little bit.” Fusco squirms as Leon pushes his knees apart and a jolt of sudden arousal runs through him. “I’m just, uh, not used to…oh god,” he mumbles as Leon yanks his underwear down to his knees.

Leon pauses mid-grab for Fusco’s dick. “Yeah, but is it just normal sex freaking out or ‘We need to stop’ freaking out? ‘Cause that’s kind of important.”

“We don’t need to stop.”

Leon smiles with unexpected warmth. “Okay. Good.” Then his hand is closed tight around Fusco’s dick and Leon’s clambering on top of him and it’s all kind of soft-edged and amazing from there.

What he learns very quickly about Leon is that, without any restraint, the guy can’t really focus on any one thing. So what he does is try to focus on everything all at once. In what feels like a minute his hands are pinning Fusco’s wrists to the mattress, squeezing hard at his ass, jerking him off, playing with his nipples, and holding his face still while kissing it, deliberate and wet. Leon’s trying to be everywhere, do everything. Fusco’s just trying to keep his hands on Leon’s waist, keep him here and relatively still.

Next thing he can remember is Leon spitting copiously into his palm and saying, “Hey, can I cuff you next time?”

“I don’t…” He trails off gasping as he’s enveloped in a slick grip. “Who says there’s gonna be a next time?”

“Whatever, guy. It’s not that big a city.” Leon settles on Fusco’s upper thighs so he can’t quite move and starts to stroke, slow and curious. “Or do you have something else going on?”

Fusco’s hands dig tight into Leon’s waist, tight enough to leave bruises in the gap between his hip and his ribcage. “Maybe,” he grunts.

“ _Maybe?_ ” Leon bends down to meet him, face to face. “Who turns down a date for maybe?” Their noses bump.

“Does seem a little short-sighted,” he admits.

“Right? Anyway,” and Leon’s right hand starts to pick up the pace while his left hand roves casually across Fusco’s chest, seeks out his nipple, starts to tease and pinch, “if there is a next time, which we’re not saying there will be, but there _totally should be_ , can I tie you up or something? Maybe not cuffs. Those kinda hurt.” Leon’s staring him down, giving him really serious puppy dog eyes. “Please?”

Fusco tries to spread his legs wider, tries to arch his chest to follow Leon’s hand. “ _I don’t know_.”

“It’d be fuuuuuun.”

“What would you even,” his voice breaks when Leon’s thumb rubs hard at the head of his cock, “ _do_ with me?”

“Dunno,” Leon admits. He’s still right there, still bent over Fusco, still grinning though it’s gentler now, happy and thoughtful. “I just like the idea. I haven’t got it all worked out yet. I’m not really a details guy. Or a long-term planning guy. Or a…”

The ball gag, dangling from its strap around Leon’s neck, bounces in his eyeline, leaves a spit-wet kiss on Fusco’s cheek. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good enough,” and it seems like Leon might really think it is.  “You wanna come?”

He tries not to sob when he says, “ _Yes_.”

“Okay. Here we go. I’ve got you.”

It’s obvious, maybe, but he likes this part. He really likes the way Leon finishes him off because there’s something about the way he does it that’s all eagerness and no obligation. It’s a sad realization that most of his life’s orgasms have been obligatory, a function of exchange.  It’s been a while since someone was excited to give him one, since someone coaxed and encouraged and muttered in his ear, “Come on, pal, you’re almost there” and then he _is_ there, crashing hard over the tipping point and into Leon. The kiss Leon slams into his mouth tastes like smoke and beer and the humid garden in California where his weed is grown.

Fusco rolls the two of them so they’re side by side, a tangle of knees and elbows.  Leon wastes no time burrowing his way against Fusco’s chest, heaves a contented little sigh once he’s wedged in secure between Fusco’s upper arm and the cushioned curve of his ribcage.

“That was fun,” Leon says.

Fusco thinks about it. “Yeah,” he admits. “It was good.”

Leon pokes him hard in the ribs on each syllable. “And you didn’t think it would be.”

“Nope.” Fusco nudges him with a knee until Leon stops jabbing at him. “I was wrong. I can admit that.”

“Good.”  Then, prodding, nearly shy, “Next time?”

Fusco looks down, meets Leon’s faux-pleading stare. “What do you want a next time for?”

“I had fun!” Leon snaps defensively. He twists hard beneath Fusco’s arm and his elbows and knees momentarily become lethal before they settle and drape over and around Fusco’s limbs. “You just said you did. Plus, the last girl I hooked up with handcuffed me to a bed so Nigerian gangsters could kill me. So, you know, I’m kind of realizing the value of a reliable booty call.”

“Holy shit, you are really romantic, you know that?” Fusco shifts a little, makes himself comfortable, then lets himself think about what Leon just said. “That true? About your ex-girlfriend and the Nigerians?”

“She wasn’t my girlfriend.” He sighs wistfully.

Fusco narrows his eyes. “And you still wanted me to cuff you to a bed after that?”

“Well, yeah.” Leon blinks up at him. “What am I supposed to do, never do anything fun or trust anybody ever again? I can’t live like that, man. I’ve got things to do.” Leon gives Fusco a pat on the thigh just above where his underwear is still scrunched down around his knees as if to confirm that, yes, Leon counts Fusco as one of the things he’s got to do. “Like I said, you, uh. You’re a nice guy.”

“Oh.”

“Yup.” Leon’s done talking. When Fusco tries to open his mouth, Leon shoves his head up under Fusco’s chin and shuts his eyes tight.

“I’m not that nice of a guy,” Fusco tells him after a while.

Nothing. Leon rubs his cheek against Fusco’s chest and goes still.

“I’m working on being better,” he murmurs into Leon’s hair. It’s shot with unexpected gray. He wonders how old Leon is. He wonders if the gray is premature, if he just robbed a cradle, because Leon seems so young sometimes. “But I’ve done terrible things.”

Still nothing.

“You’re an idiot for trusting me.”

If Leon isn’t already asleep, he doesn’t let Fusco know about it.

Leon cuddles like an overly attached squid and Fusco can’t shove him away without thinking of the solitary dent in his mattress at home, so he just stretches himself enough to hit the switch on the tiny motel lamp and plunge half the bed into murky dimness. He can’t reach the one on the other side, so he turns his head away.

That’s how he spends the night.

The morning is an empty spot beside him and a smeared, inky phone number scratched laboriously into his palm in ballpoint pen.

The first thing he does is wash his hands.


End file.
